Tim Powers - Hide Me Among the Graves

“You,” said Gabriel, “what, accept their amnesty?”

Trelawny gave him a scornful look from under his bushy white eyebrows. “I use it, sonny. I’ve been making amends for things I did in Greece, in Euboea and on Mount Parnassus, forty years ago.” Trelawny’s scarred lips gave him an expression that was only humorously rueful.

Gabriel and Christina glanced at each other, and Gabriel mouthed the word Parnassus.

“The Italian Carbonari pursue efforts similar to mine,” said Trelawny, “but I’m not a joiner. Any time you work with people, they turn out to be inept clowns.” He glanced at Crawford, which Crawford thought was unfair. “I get things done by myself,” Trelawny went on. “Your old woman, Carpace or Carpaccio, she hoped to introduce another of these vampires to that sad crowd of poets last night.” He laughed. “But a boat carrying a statue from Greece happened to explode on the river yesterday morning, and so Madame Carpaccio’s vitreous guest of honor is now on the river bottom. And I maintain a small army of spies—” He paused and laughed again, but to Crawford it seemed forced now, and the old man squinted around at his companions as if regretting his momentary openness. “I try to work them ill in many ways,” he said gruffly, “when Miss B. isn’t looking.” He tapped the sand with his boot toe. “And by now she’s probably burrowed right down into the sewers.”

“I’m glad we didn’t meet her last night,” said Crawford to McKee.

“What are you talking about,” snapped Trelawny, “you did meet her last night. Who the hell do you think that tall woman with me was? As I recall, she nearly lapped up your sorry soul like a cat with a bowl of milk.”

Christina stepped forward and touched Trelawny’s sleeve. “And how is it that she has come to be attached to you, Mr. Samson?”

“Attached to me. Yes. Damn it, I returned to England clean, in 1834, after a voyage across the whole Atlantic Ocean, to America, where I baptized myself by swimming the Niagara River, though it nearly killed me to do it — when I really thought I was drowning, I could feel the devil claws pulling out of me, reluctantly! I was as clean as a newborn babe—”

“Except for the half statue in your neck,” said Gabriel.

Trelawny scowled at him, then grinned around the cigar in his teeth. “Well, yes, sonny, except for that. But it hadn’t started growing yet, you see. Probably wouldn’t have. In any case, I became a responsible citizen here, wasted my time with politics, went to a lot of foolish dinners. Scandalized society by not wearing stockings. But there were still people about the place who remembered the old Neffy days, and they could recognize the — the look, on me. So I took me a wife and built a house on the cliff at Llanbadoc Rock, in Monmouthshire in eastern Wales. Lived there happily for ten years, had three more children, planted a row of cedars from cones I brought from the poet Shelley’s grave in Rome. And I happen to have a piece of Shelley’s jawbone — he was a half-breed member of their tribe by birth, and relics of him tend to deflect or refract their attention—”

“You’re Shelley’s famous friend, you’re Edward John Trelawny,” said Christina suddenly, and then she covered her mouth.

“Bad luck for me that you know it,” said Trelawny. He frowned and rubbed his eyes with a spotted old hand. “Don’t tell me who you are.”

“Oh, you wouldn’t have heard of me,” said Christina.

Trelawny dropped his hand and glared at her. “Damn it, now I know you’re an aspiring poet. Will you not speak, please?” His craggy face above the white beard was fierce, his blue eyes glittering. “At any rate! — being remote from London, and with Shelley’s jawbone to keep the devils from seeing me, I relaxed. And five years ago I went exploring up the river Severn; and eventually I rowed right up the Birmingham and Worcester Canal and—”

“You rowed up the Severn?” interrupted Gabriel.

“Byron once swam from Sestos to Abydos,” Trelawny said irritably, “and even in my forties I was in better condition than he ever was. The stories I could tell you about him!”

“Up the canal,” prompted McKee.

“Indeed. Well, I could have rowed on to Birmingham, easily, but I went ashore for the night in a little village called King’s Norton. Means ‘the king’s northern settlement’ originally. And I couldn’t sleep — I could feel someone calling me, in the old melody — so I went for a walk.”

“I know that melody,” said Christina softly.

Trelawny gave her a relenting, sympathetic look. “I’m afraid your poetry is probably very good, my dear. That’s one of their gifts. Byron was a member of the tribe too.”

To Crawford’s alarm, Christina seemed to conceal satisfaction at the remark. But, “You should have gone to a church,” she said.

“Stop it,” said Trelawny mildly. “King’s Norton lies on what they call Watling Street, the old Roman road that cuts right across Britain. I walked out of the village by moonlight, and out in the fields among the old oak trees I found stones, rounded now by weather but clearly cut by man many centuries ago, and then I was in a narrow defile, and — I met,” he said, nodding toward Crawford and McKee, “the woman you saw me with last night. Her husband had died, leaving his lands to her and her daughters, but the Romans annexed them, and flogged her and raped her daughters—”

“The Romans did?” asked Crawford.

“This was a ghost,” Gabriel told him shortly.

“Aye, a ghost,” said Trelawny, “to the extent that a figurehead is a ship. And so in revenge she led the Iceni and the Trinovantes against the Roman settlement at Colchester, and they damn well leveled the place. Then she led her barbarian army to London, and the Romans simply ran, so she leveled it too, with the help of an accommodating earthquake.”

“My God.” Christina was pale, and she nodded. “I know her name too.”

“She told you all this, there?” said Gabriel.

“She was boasting, boy,” said Trelawny softly. “Trying to appear substantial. Ghosts are ashamed of being dead.”

The cage they were in was west of the zoo wall, and Christina looked out across the grass to the south, toward where the creature had burrowed into the ground, and shook her head unhappily.

“She had sold her soul to get revenge,” Trelawny went on, “to a goddess she called Andraste, which was also called Magna Mater, and Goemagot or Gogmagog.”

Christina gripped Gabriel’s arm; she started to whisper something to him, then shut her mouth and just shook her head.

Trelawny raised an eyebrow. “We’re all in the soup, I perceive. Well, the emperor Nero was ready to abandon Britain altogether, but the Roman troops under Suetonius finally caught her on Watling Street, in the very defile I had wandered into. And her army was destroyed, and she drank poison.”

“So did Polidori,” said Gabriel.

“The last sacrament to the goddess,” said Trelawny, nodding. “But by that time she had of course been bitten by the stony goddess, and so she was not permitted to lie quiet in the earth. She — came home with me.”

“You invited her in,” said Christina.

“I couldn’t just— leave her out there! — somehow. By daylight she’s — well, you saw her: dwarfish, imbecilic, has to be covered against the sun. Can’t speak, has to wring notes out of that violin, with her hands in quilted mitts or hidden in long sleeves. When we arrived at my house, this was five years ago, I had to carry her up the hill, near bursting my heart with the effort of it. While she’s ‘alive’ she always weighs the same, regardless of her volume. I told my wife she was a long-lost daughter of mine, and she lived with us, even when we moved to a nearby estate, Cefn Ila. I took precautions, you understand, even though I had Shelley’s jawbone — garlic and mirrors and wood and silver — she was never free to consummate a link with me or any of my family. But —”